The Linux Administration group is for the discussion of technical issues technical issues that arise during the administration of Linux systems, including maintaining the operating system and supporting end-user applications.

pgrep nfs
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/sbin/service command is actually a shell script with execute permission to all
When you execute as non-root and check for nfs status you actually got redirected and executing /etc/init.d/nfs status
Check the directory and file permission in /usr/lib/nfs/.. I think that's where the bottleneck of using non-root.

I've just told the user that using 'service' is not accurate for non root users.
It was more of an interesting thing that the user could call it, but it returned an incorrect response rather than denying access.

This has two factors:
1. The mount options you used when mounting the file system either in vfstab/fstab depending on your OS.
2. Monitoring the system log which these would be recorded and location/name of the file is OS dependent.

If you want to get a little fancier, you could look into the syslog.conf file to configure syslogd.

Yes, I understood that.
Would you then agree that /etc/init.d/nfs status is reporting the wrong status?
I've not pulled the script apart, but my thoughts are that if it is run by a non-root user, it should return a message saying you don't have permission, or return the correct result (better outcome).